Linguist wins £100,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize

 

Professor Sam Wolfe

Sam Wolfe, Professor of French and Romance Linguistics in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize by the Leverhulme Trust.

The Prizes recognise the achievement of outstanding research scholars whose future career is exceptionally promising, and whose work has made original and significant contributions to knowledge as well as shown sustained international impact. Only 30 prizes are awarded throughout the UK each year. Each prize winner receives £100,000 which can be used for any purpose related to the advancement of their research. 

Professor Wolfe's work combines evidence from historical manuscripts with the latest tools from theoretical linguistics and language acquisition to develop theories on why the Romance languages – spoken by nearly a billion people on the planet – take the grammatical ’shape’ that they do. He will use the prize money towards conducting detailed research into how social structure and language acquisition interact to speed up or slow down grammatical change. This will involve fieldwork in France, Italy, Brazil, Canada, and Romania to explore how different languages have evolved in very different circumstances.

He says: ‘This award will have a transformational impact on my research and allow me to dedicate my time to better understanding how and why languages change very quickly in some circumstances but remain very stable in others. The project will be challenging but I am very much looking forward to seeing the results and the impact on our understanding of linguistic variation and change. I am very grateful to be part of a University, two Faculties, and a College that allow me freedom to pursue research questions which interest me, even if we don’t yet know what results this will yield.’

Professor Philomen Probert, Faculty Board Chair of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, says: ‘I am delighted to see Sam Wolfe honoured by the award of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. His work on syntactic stability as well as change is at the cutting edge of historical linguistics—a field which has traditionally been synonymous with the study of language change, but is now on the brink of the idea that stability can be as intriguing as change, and as worth trying to explain.’

Professor Jonathan Thacker, Faculty Board Chair of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, says: 'The whole of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages is delighted to hear of Professor Sam Wolfe's success and will look forward to learning from and engaging with the cutting-edge research that the Philip Leverhulme Prize will do so much to support.'

You can read more about the Prizes, and the University's three other winners this year, https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-10-21-four-oxford-researchers-win-100000-...https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-10-21-four-oxford-researchers-win-100000-philip-leverhulme-prizes.